“There never was any spell!” the red-haired young woman insisted. “Herr Brunnow is a lecher who has many times tried to put his hands on me! The only reason he has had little desire for his wife is because she is shaped similarly to a hog!”
The wife in question stepped forward to slap this young woman but instead fell to the ground in convulsions. That seemed to be the final straw and the young woman was dragged away while others went to the aid of the convulsing victim. Karl, the man of reason who had tried earlier to argue sense to this mob, stood by helplessly and watched.
I could barely believe what I was seeing. Marking a victim of a bewitching with the witch’s blood to break a spell was an old wives’ tale that had long ago been forgotten, and here it was being dragged out again. Was I the cause of this? Was my being seen in other cities and villages the cause of this resurgent belief in witches? I watched, dumbfounded, as the wood cottage the young woman was thrown into was set ablaze.
They were going to burn her alive.
Without any thought of the consequences I rushed out from my hiding place. At first there was little more than looks of dumbfounded amazement on the faces of the members of the mob in front of me, then several of the men tried to block my advance, but once I knocked them aside, the others ran off. I kicked in the door of the burning cottage and dashed in without breaking stride. The young woman inside lay collapsed on the floor. The fire had yet to consume her, but the smoke was thick inside, and it must have been suffocating her. Although my eyes began to tear badly and the flames licked at my body, I made my way through so I could carry her out to safety. I held her in my arms as I ran from the burning cottage. Once outside, my path was blocked. Many of the men had armed themselves with pitchforks and other weapons and stood waiting for me. The frau still lay flopping around on the ground as if some unseen force had a grip on her and was shaking her like a child would a rattle. Her husband ignored this to point a bony finger at me and shout that I was proof that the woman was a witch. That the Devil himself had come to rescue her.
I slung the young woman over my shoulder, and as the men came toward me with their weapons I batted them aside—not hard enough to kill them but hard enough to send them flying. Soon a path opened up before me and I ran, ignoring the shouts and curses of the men behind me. Within seconds I entered the forest and the safety that it offered. I kept running until I had left the village far behind me. When I came to a clearing and a soft bed of grass, I lay the young woman upon it.
She was unconscious and her breathing remained shallow. While my field of study was chemistry, I had a small understanding of medical procedures, and understood that her breathing was being restricted by the smoke that she had inhaled. I needed to breathe fresh life into her or she might perish where she lay. Gingerly I opened her mouth and blew air into her. After a minute of this she began coughing, and I backed away from her. When she opened her eyes and they focused on me, a dismal look weighed on her features.
“Am I in Hell?” she asked, her voice weak, the effects of the smoke still heavy on her. “Is that why Satan is standing over me?”
“I am not Satan,” I said. “I am a passerby who rescued you from the mob who tried to burn you within your cottage. You are still alive and of this earth.”
She closed her eyes, and for a long moment I became worried that the fire had ended her life regardless of my efforts. But I detected that she was still breathing, even if only shallowly, and her eyes opened again. This time they held a dullness to them as she stared at me.
“You have taken me to feast on my flesh,” she said in a despondent whisper.
“Why would you say that?”
“That is what is being said. That a daemonic fiend has been stealing young girls to feast on them.”
I shook my head. “My diet is mostly what I forage in the forest. Berries and mushrooms. I took you from that burning cottage to rescue you, and for no other purpose.”
She thought about that for several minutes, a look of deep consternation ruining her brow.
At last, she said, “If that is true then I must be a witch after all. I did not believe it when that hag Frau Brunnow accused me, but why else would a daemonic creature suddenly come to my rescue?”
“You are not a witch, since they do not exist, and I am not a daemonic creature,” I said, although I was not at all sure of that anymore. Dark, satanic magic breathed life into the hideous form that I now resided within, and if it wasn’t the Devil behind the feverish obsession that had sent me skulking through homes in my search for Victor Frankenstein, then what could it have been? Still, though, I prayed that my soul hadn’t been completely eroded, and that some of Friedrich Hoffmann’s sensibilities still resided within my heart.
Her eyes grew puzzled at she looked at me. “Then what are you?” she asked.
“I was once a man,” I said. “Terrible things were done to me, but I believe I still hold some of my former goodness.”
She did not look convinced, but she was too weak to do much more than close her eyes. I used my cape to clean her face, which had been darkened with soot, and then I went to off to find her water and food. During my earlier nighttime excursions, I had stolen a flask. When I found a spring flowing with fresh water I filled this flask that I now carried on me, and after finding a raspberry bush, I returned back to her. She accepted the water and berries that I offered her, and after several minutes she regained the strength to sit up.
“What will become of me?” she asked.
“You will rest until you are able to travel, and then I will take you to a new village where you will be safe.”
Her face darkened as she considered this. “There is no such village,” she said. “Whether or not you are a daemonic creature, it does not matter. Word will spread throughout the countryside of how the Devil rescued me from being burned alive as a witch. Anywhere I go they will now believe that I am a witch, and they will burn me also.”
This was true. Stories of this kind spread quickly.
“Then I will take you to a foreign land where nobody has heard of this. I will see you safe before I leave you.”
She gave me a hopeless look to show that she did not believe that that would be possible, but she was too tired and weak to argue, and instead closed her eyes and drifted into a sound sleep.
I watched her for a moment, and then after laying my cape over her, I gathered firewood so that she would be warm enough when night fell.
CHAPTER
12
When morning came and she opened her eyes and saw me standing guard over her, she looked up at me with an expression devoid of any emotion and without a single reflection of the hideousness of my appearance, which, without my cape to conceal me, was fully exposed to her. “It was not a nightmarish dream as I had hoped it was,” she said.
“I am afraid not.”
She deliberated on this, a hardness settling over her features as she did so. When she was done, the hardness faded leaving behind vulnerability. “I suppose if you had ill intentions toward me you would have acted on them already. It is true that you only wished to save my life?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you then,” she said. “And thank you also for covering me with your cape to keep me warm. But you may reclaim it. I can already feel the sun’s rays upon my face.”
“Later,” I said. “There is still a chill in the air.”
She nodded and closed her eyes again. “I am afraid I am too weak to stand.”
“That is to be expected. You will rest here until your strength has returned, and then I will take you someplace where you will be safe and can start life anew. Someplace where stories of your rescue will not haunt you. Perhaps Geneva?”